Fatherhood Eve

Friday, August 10, 2018

2 Minutes. Go!

Write whatever you want in the 'comments' section on this blog post. Play as many times as you like. #breaktheblog! You have two minutes (give or take a few seconds ... no pressure!). Have fun. The more people who play, the more fun it is. So, tell a friend. Then send 'em here to read your 'two' and encourage them to play

You
gotta act like it’s the most important thing in the world or they’ll get wise.
You need to borrow a paper smile because you cannot do the origami yourself –
they are laughing at you. Mocking you. You are lost in it. It’s not hard to
pretend for a little while, but then the pretending becomes indistinguishable
from not pretending. Play it off. Count on peoples’ self-interest and
self-absorption. Because most of them are like you. Running in the hamster
wheel of their own mind. They bluff.

Don’t
call their bluff, but be aware of it.

Secrets
are death. You need to be careful. You start keeping too many secrets and
everything will go to hell. Right straight to hell.

And
I don’t mean hell as a place because I don’t believe there is one. I mean they
will eat you. Corrode you from the
inside. They will corrupt you, and you will be neck deep before you know it - with
those secrets weighing you down.

Pulling
you under.

We
live in a world of caricatures. Everybody has their role to play. The
friendlier ones make you happy. The others make sure you pay.

I
want to lay a golden egg and throw it through the window of your house. Your
apartment. Box. Tree. Whatever. I want to make a noise loud enough that
everyone will have to
stop and take notice. I need more soapboxes. I feel so dirty. I’ve got to purge
it. Blow it out of my brain and onto the page, oozing. I need to stand in front
of a crowd, pure rage. I need the world to not go bonkers every time I turn a page.

You
turn a blind eye? I don’t have much sympathy for you. There are times in life
where you have to remember that what’s right is right even if it is inconvenient.
Surely.

Please…

#2minutesgo Tweet it! Share it! Shout it from the top of the shack you live in! I will be out most of the day, but I'll be back...#2minutesgo Tweet it! Share it! Shout it from the top of the shack you live in! I will be out most of the day, but I'll be back...

61 comments:

That last line... "There are times in life where you have to remember that what’s right is right even if it is inconvenient," and the origami smile will be with me today. It's golden, and it's sure as hell not an egg.

Though he was a native speaker, the language felt heavy on his tongue sometimes. Why was a man handsome, but a woman beautiful? If people love their dogs, how can "bitch" be an insult?

When he was a child, he believed he was an alien, placed here to learn the ways of humans. All through grade school, he kept one eye on the sky, awaiting the inevitable pick-up for debriefing.

There were reasons, sensible ones, why he couldn’t possibly be from this place, of this family, of this species. He heard music, unearthly music, when he watched the stars through the gauzy curtains. He found the rhythms, the mathematics, of everything in life. He counted things, everything, under his breath.

Smells, too, affected him in ways difficult to describe. Others spoke of the perfume of the rose, for instance, but the scent made him hungry, not in a stomach-rumbling kind of way, but for emotions. Rage, harmony, and after puberty, lust.

He couldn’t bear flannel sheets. They made his skin crawl. His mother, or the woman who pretended to be his mother, pleaded for him not to tear the sheets off the bed when they were the only ones she had.

He told everyone he was allergic to wool, but that was a lie. When wool touched his flawless skin, he heard sheep crying out in pain, of the cold they felt when they were naked.

And why was he the only one who had hazel eyes? His brothers, all four of them, had brown eyes, to match their dark brown hair, which his was not. He had blond, almost white hair.

Some mornings, he stared at himself in the mirror, the same mirror he was convinced had a camera behind it to observe his every move. He cataloged every square inch of his skin, whether it was the same or different as when he last inventoried it. Was that mole growing? How fast? Why was there a single hair near his left nipple? Why didn't his sweat smell like other boys'?

In the summer of his sixteenth year, he heard a click, like one piece of heavy machinery meeting another, in his head. And he understood.

They were never coming back for him. They had collected all the data they needed remotely. He was nothing more than an instrument in some off-world scientist's hands.

That winter, he slept on flannel sheets. He did not hear the cries of sheep when he put on his hand-me-down wool coat. And when he saw the stars, they no longer sang for him.

Numbers lost their magic, and a rose was just a rose.

He stopped speaking, that summer, haunted by the inadequacy of words to express the horrible emptiness he felt.

He was a lost alien, defective, looking for words in a language he never really knew.

He was a math teacher. He taught me all I know about trigonometry and geometry. And now, thirty years later, he was dying.

I tried to visit him once a week, though in truth, I missed a couple of visits. Each time I saw him, he looked smaller. Cancer can do that to a man, even a man who once laughingly described his body as a perfect sphere.

But the room in which he lived seemed to grow larger. After a few visits, I noticed things gone. The globe and its stand were the first things I noticed. Then the telescope by the window. Then there were shelves, once crammed with books, that showed empty spaces.

Finally I asked him about it.

“I’m giving it all away.”

“But why? Don’t you find the things you’ve found, the things you’ve carried with you through all your life comforting?”

He wheezed while he composed his answer.

“We spend all our lives thinking life is addition. Buy this, get that, make more room for stuff.”

I nodded. “It’s the American way.”

He laughed, then coughed.

“But in the end, it’s not about addition. It’s about subtraction. It’s like being a sculptor, starting with a block of marble. You don’t keep adding to the block. You only take away the bits that aren’t essential to what you, and only you, see hidden in the stone.”

Still a math teacher, with a minor in Art.

“I’ve lost my wife. My son has a life of his own. And now, I’m clearing away the last bits of stuff. So all that’s left is what I am. Not the stuff.”

I shook my head. “But isn’t it all part of you?”

“It’s all part of what formed the block of marble, of what I was carved from. But now it’s dust on the floor of the sculptor’s studio.”

He closed his eyes, I thought to sleep. But he opened them as I stood to leave.

“Open that drawer over there.”

I did. And it was empty, but for one thing.

“You remember it?”

“I do.”

“it’s yours.”

It was a slide rule… the one he used in teaching us physics.

“Thank you.”

I shook his hand, and promised to visit him the following week. Of course, I never saw him again.

I think of him often. Of his lesson that we are defined not by what we keep, but by what we give away.

I’d always called him Mr. Johnson. I never knew his first name till I read the obituary. Leonardo. A fitting name for a mathematician and a sculptor of life.

OK, I am a teacher and that makes me biased, but I LOVE this one. “It’s all part of what formed the block of marble, of what I was carved from. But now it’s dust on the floor of the sculptor’s studio.” - the pace and restraint on the sentiment front. This is awesome.

You fight a battlein a room with rounded cornersand no sharps.Sullen video screen shows tired docufilmsor the hospital channel guide.Your phone exiled to a small lockboxguarded by drivers license, house keys, and a watchful orderly.

There is no darkness on the ward.Fuzzy lights create vague shadows, wavering in eldritch tempo to the pulsing of watchful devices.The low ebb of small hours,stretching like lunatic taffytwisted by nonsense fragments.

Echoes of not-silence. Tear-stained giggles across the hall.Soft tapping of medical keyboardsmagnify and climb inside earslike tap-dancing mules.Stubborn bray of the smoking coughtwo open doorways to the left.

Wow. You had me from "too a.m." A roller coaster of images and sounds and emotions in this one... and you used a word I didn't know, but is now echoing through my head: eldritch. Perfect choice. This is powerful.

The grim non-progression of time.The manifest destiny of two a.m.:to bloat and engulf sprawling herdsof darkened minutes turning back upon themselveslike the latticework of scars on wrists and thighs of the ghost-faced teen from group a thousand uncounted hours ago.

All circularity, the thoughts, the sights,mirroring the blunted room cornersso they only bludgeon, cannot cut.But, like the memories, swerving endless lapsin the back streets of your mind,the dull bashing as they ram you.Connecting like bare toesexploding in lightless fireworks of painagainst the unseen steel walls in your head.

Meds delivered so long ago they failed to ever start working. The wall chart says eleven minutes ago, and they’ll come back in three hours, forty nine minutes,or did they forget to bring them at all, and the marks on the whiteboard are the reminder of their missed arrival.

The ward is empty of people to ask,the overseer guardians gone,wisps of fog wearing scrubs.So this must be a false vision,because they are never gone.Nightmares of being awake,so precise, such relentless agony.

Your eyesblink awake.See the murky numbers on the clock are the same. No change from when you were last awake,but now the marker board is blank.Erased like reality’s boundary.Your eyes scrape open againto see there is no clock here.

The degenerate orbit,the waste cycle of the day’s eventsswirl in the form of dirty bathwater struggling to avoid the drain.Leaving dark stains, and flakes of worn-out skin,and one lonesome strand wrapped around the escape hole.

As your eyes flicker openyou realize the waking dreamcaptured you again. You ask a nursewhen will your meds start,but only emptiness hears you,matching your life, and the vacant places where friends should be.

The brisk tread of the nurse in pale greenmeans you are awake this time.Except she has that too-thin face of the girl from groupand the sparkle of blades in her handwhich means that

your eyes flutter in the dim lightwhere there is no darknessand there are no hours or minutes here,just the recycled cascade of two a.m.refilling itselfas hatchet blows of regretand guiltand self-inflicted mistakeschop at the last shard of self-worth.

You shout at the nurse who walks away,your waving arms dislodge the weights on your eyes and you stumble to wakefulness with no clocksbut the knowledge of two a.m. is bone-deep, and bruises youas the solitude closes over your head again.

The choking taste of despair, bile in your throat,you stagger down the hall to clear the vomit burning,only to catch the tang, bitter sourness,as you flail awake in this flat, narrow bed.Lack of comfort implying sterile health.

In the absence of timepieces,two a.m. reigns with brutal completeness.Your breathless sobs go unheardin the isolationof the not-quite darkness that crowds inand still it isn’t the moment for the quieting pills,so the pillowcase blots fresh woundsof loneliness from your face.

And the unfair dystopia of two a.m. shrieks curfew in your directionas you thrash from a dream of wakefulnessinto wakefulness like a dream.And begin again,on the ward, at two a.m.

I am breathless... seriously... the pace of this just accelerates and accelerates into places that are frightening and yet comfortable in their repetition and familiarity. And the loop back at the end to the beginning. Thank you for this... the insight, the view, of a place too often seen, and yet, rarely seen.

The art show was well attended, with the usual mix of self-proclaimed critics, browsers, artists, agents, and a sprinkling of individuals actually interested in purchasing some art either for the charitable donation kudoes, or possibly because they actually like a piece. Some days it was hard to tell them aparat.

"How incredibly common. An owl at a winter arts display. So banal."

"Odd that you should call this piece common when it features an endangered species. i thought that was what this display was all about."

"I beg your pardon?"

"No need to beg. There's no pardon given to a snot like you."

harrumph harrumph

"Audrey, if you are going to be such a prig, take it to the second gallery. It's all terribly modern in there and you will have a ball. In the meantime, leave the fine arts to those of us actually in the field, hmm?"

I agree... by giving such a clear view into the character's personality, you didn’t even have to "show" or "tell" the physical actions... we knew them already! This is why, when people deride "tropes," I smile and remind them that tropes have power.

I stood staring in awe, my jaw weakening but not yet dropping. Surrounded by a vista of mountains, layers upon layers of snow capped peaks and shadowy nooks. Where the snow stopped the treeline began, mostly conifers shaped like distant Christmas trees all piled in together.

What I saw was simply astounding. Images of every time in my life I had seen this display of majesty swirled behind my eyes: my first snow, driving on cliff edges, climbing stone by stone, picking and cutting a tree for the holidays, my father's skiing accident. Being reassured again and again that animals got scarcer the high up you went. It all whooshed up, the memories running like motion pictures through my mind, asif trying to distract me from the reality I stood in.

I could not manage to tear my eyes away, not even the sharp rattling sound of tiny dry bones in a shaman's turtle shell wand.

You listen to me, boy. There's one way to do it, and that's my way. Yeah, of course there are other ways, but they're the wrong ways. Are you fucking retarded? Do I need to use smaller words? Sorry, I can't. It would sully the intrinsic worth of my literary ambition.

Antidisestablishmentarianism.

It's so good of you to share your genius with the masses. Especially folks like me. Heathens who listened to Crass when they were supposed to be paying attention in class.

Oh look! A shiny panda. Did you even know they came in shiny? They do! Shiny, shiny, shiny!

Brothers and sisters, we come here today …

I told her to stop yelling at me. I pleaded. She sharpened her needles. cross-stich is a bitch. You should try it my way. You just throw a bunch of thread on top of a stack of cross-stich patterns. Shit's postmodern as fuck.

I've wanted to use that word, and found out it didn't mean what I wanted it to mean. But the men in black suits will tell you what the words mean when they get around to it. The rapid shifts are wonderful.

Walking across the orchard takes Eugene longer now. But this doesn’t dissuade him. Even though the sky is washed with blue-gray mist and tiny sleet pellets bounce off the oilcloth sleeves of his old barn coat. Even though the ground is frosted and lumpy and altogether unsuitable for walking, he lumbers along with a cane in one hand and Wyeth’s leash in the other. His old boy has gray in his jowls and his vision is going, and oftentimes both of them hobble on their sore hips, but the Irish Setter knows the way; seems to know each dip and rise of the earth and steers Eugene’s path toward level footing. While he was getting dressed, sitting on the bed to don his trousers, socks, and boots, he tried to remember the lines of the poem, the one about the young man who was not strong enough for this world, and it was painful to admit to himself that he’d need to bring the book with him. It’s a small volume, fortunately, and it jostles along in his left pocket; the usual offering wrapped carefully and tucked into his right.

He takes long, careful breaths and watches the white vapor of his exhales dissolve into the mist. He recalls the questions he used to ask the rabbi when he was a child. So many questions. “What happens to your soul when you die?” “Where do the memories go?” “If there’s no heaven and no hell, how do we meet again?” Eugene smiles a bit to himself, remembering how he’d exasperated the poor man into finally ending with “Some things are just meant to be mysteries.”

Then his daughter’s voice comes back to him. “It isn’t your fault, you know.” He’d been so angry with her for saying that. Yelled out a blue streak of words he quickly regretted but never apologized for. Intellectually, he knew she was right. But what if... Everyone in the neighborhood knew the path of his morning walks. Up the hill, across the orchard, down again. They could set their clocks by him. What if the boy—it hurts too much to even think his name; even Trudy’s voice breaks on the rare times she talks about her son—what if the boy had hesitated, waiting for him, hoping Eugene would stop him?

Useless to think such things anymore, he tells himself. But still, each year he’s compelled to come here. And once again his feet and trusty Wyeth propel him across the unkempt and sometimes frozen meadow, through the sleeping peach and apple trees. To the one tree. The one he talked them out of cutting down.

It isn’t hard to find, the oak that borders the smaller fruit trees. Over time the boy’s four brothers had memorialized it, each in his own way. One year he saw a smear on it that he swore was lipstick, Trudy’s usual shade. The tree looks lonely. In his imagination he places Trudy beside it, in her blue down coat, her hair wild and not as red as it used to be, waiting for Eugene so they could walk back together.

Wyeth stops, looks back, as if to prompt him. “Thank you, my friend,” Eugene says, getting out the book of poems. He pulls in a breath, steadies himself as he finds the page, whispers the words that are carried away on the breeze. Then, so carefully, he takes the package from his other pocket, unwraps the tissue from the single purple blossom, Trudy’s favorite, and tucks it into a seam in the bark.

As he pats the trunk, in reverence, in regret, in memory, Wyeth starts, letting out a low bark. Eugene looks behind him. His daughter is crossing the meadow, one hand up in somber greeting. For a second his eyes fool him into seeing her as she was then, so small. Standing so straight and brave at the boy’s funeral. Eugene blinks and she’s grown, and married, and out of his house. She leans toward the oak and kisses the bark, right over the spot Trudy’s son James had carved his initials. Then links her arm through his. “If you’re done, Dad, let’s go inside. I’ll make you breakfast.”

Don't ask me where I get this stuff....Part OneWell I can’t prove it, of course, but I have a pretty good idea of what happened. I haven’t stayed the resident manager here at the Intrada Arms for five years without leaning a few things about human nature. I keep very close tabs on my people and keep a clean place, too.But that Winger woman in 4C? That one has me about at the end of my string, let me tell you. Oh she’s nice enough, but I knew from Day One the cloth she was cut from. It’s not that I haven’t seen my share of divorcees, either. Hauling around their little kids and trying to make ends meet. Sad, most of ‘em, hard-working even. But not Joanie Winger, she’s been on the make since the day she moved in here and out on that nice dentist from the Westside. You don’t think I don’t see her every morning? Out there on her balcony doing yoga poses and showing off her merchandise?But what the good Lord gives us in some areas he takes away somewhere else, I always say. And he may have bestowed her with double d’s , mile long legs and a back end booty that would make one of them Kardashians jealous; he made the woman dumb as a box of rocks in the bargain. Can’t cook, can’t clean and can’t remember her security code for more than ten minutes at a time. I got eyes, don’t I? People are creatures of habit and hers? None too good.Which is why I know she let her laundry go too long again last weekend. I guess she figured it would be okay because the units were pretty much empty what with the long holiday weekend and that little brat of hers off somewhere with the dentist. I think they sold that big place of theirs on the Westside as part of the settlement . She got the brat, but he got the boat, so more than likely they were out on the lake. Divorce is so tragic, don’t you think? It’s always the kids who suffer; either he’s trapped on a boat with a bunch of dentists or at home with his half brained mom who can’t cook anything more complicated than organic spaghetti-Os and those overpriced salads they peddle at Whole Foods. A shame, really.So anyways, the one I like to call Willy Wonka in 5D mentioned he’d seen her dragging about a hundred pounds of laundry down to the laundry room about 9:30 on Saturday morning when respectable people are out doing something better. I guess she figured she could commando the commercial 3 loaders we have that day, because he said she had on nothing better than a nightshirt and a had a whole sack of quarters on her hip. The strange thing was, he told me, she was also wearing tap shoesI can’t say for certain because that day I was down at the animal shelter, helping to prepare rescues for the trauma of the fireworks coming on Monday, but before I left, I dropped off the baby monitor I use to oversee the laundry with Virginia Henderson in 3D, just to make sure nothing weird goes on down there when I’m out. It doesn’t have a camera or anything, but you can hear things. I got when it old Mr. Simpson in 4 F almost had himself a heart attack when he found a raccoon in one of the dryers last March when we had that ice storm. Goodness, all that carrying on over a damn raccoon? But like I said, I keep tabs on my people. They’re like family, y’know?

Part TwoNever seek trouble till trouble troubles you. But trouble was coming for that Winger woman. I could pretty much tell. I have a sixth sense for that kind of thing. Besides, I’d already seen the hanger tag on Joanie’s doorknob, threatening to turn off the gas unless she paid up. I don’t say nothing when that kind of thing happens. It ain’t my business.And of course, I can’t prove a thing, but I imagine that this is what happened. Miss Butterflies for Brains suddenly realizes that she is all alone in the building and her night shirt needs washing, too. So she strips it off, throws it into the triple loader and begins practicing her tap routine for the part she has in the community theater, which from what I understand, is pretty complicated for a woman like Joanie, even if she does do Yoga, because the tap routine has more than six actual steps. Why any sane person decides to get involved in something like that on the high side of 35 is beyond me, but like I said, she’s the kind that needs attention.Of course, nobody heard the gas man working overtime pounding on her front door. Why would she? She’s in the laundry room, working out Shuffle Off to Buffalo in the altogether like some deranged starlet before she adds the Downy.So he came around to the basement walkout and starts pounding on the door to turn off the meter.I can just imagine it; She needs to have the gas to run the dryer, right? So, bold as you please, she strides right up to that door wearing nothing but her tap shoes and six tattoos, and all the poor man can see is the one on her belly with the cowboy riding the atom bomb and a arrow pointing down toward her hoochie coo that says, “In God We Trust!”It ain’t just me, either. Right about then , poor Virginia was alarmed by the sounds she heard coming from the baby monitor. Like all them commercial washers were on spin cycle and whatever was carrying on down there it sure as hell wasn’t a couple of raccoons.But old Mr. Simpson did tell me that when the gas man left his vest was on backwards.And I haven’t said a word. How could I?But I run a clean place here at the Intrada. So when I heard the rumor, I did go down there myself and wipe down the commercial 3 loaders with Lysol.You know, just in case.

I sit on my front porch and stare at the house across the street. It's just a house, nothing special. A tidy yellow house. But, still I stare at it, day after day, and wonder. There are three trees in the yard. Nothing remarkable about that, trees are everywhere in our small, midwestern town. These three trees are dead. On a street full of healthy oaks, maples, and fir trees is a yard with three dead trees. Not a leaf to be seen on any of them. And I wonder. I see the family come and go during the day, but at night...not a light to be seen in the house. Not a glow from a television, or lamp...nothing. I know there is electricity because there is a porch light, but, inside...nothing but darkness. And I wonder. Where is the light? I could go over and introduce myself to my neighbors, find out the real story as to why the trees are dead, and why I can't see light coming from the little yellow house across the street, but, sometimes, it's just more fun to sit on my front porch and wonder.